Synopsis

Zero Dark Thirty A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.Maya is a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst, recruited “out of high school” around 1999, tasked with finding the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In 2003 she is stationed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. She and fellow officer Dan, attend the blacksite interrogations of Ammar, a detainee with suspected links to several of the 2001 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, who is subjected to approved torture interrogation techniques. Ammar provides unreliable information on a suspected attack in Saudi Arabia, but does reveal to Maya the previously unknown name of the personal courier for bin Laden, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Other detainee intelligence connects courier traffic by Abu Ahmed between Abu Faraj al-Libbi and bin Laden. In 2005, Faraj denies knowing about a courier named Abu Ahmed; she interprets this as an attempt by Faraj to conceal the importance of Abu Ahmed.In 2009 during the Camp Chapman attack, Maya’s fellow officer and friend Jessica is killed.

On the same day a case manager that liked the Abu Ahmed lead, shares with her an interrogation with a Jordanian detainee claiming to have personally buried Abu Ahmed in 2001. Maya learns what the CIA was told five years earlier, that Morocco caught Ibrihim Sayeed traveling under the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Realizing her lead may be alive, Maya contacts Dan, now a senior officer at the CIA headquarters. She speculates that the CIA’s photograph of “Abu Ahmed” is that of his brother, Habeeb, who was killed in Afghanistan. Maya says that their beards and native clothes make all of the brothers look alike. This would explain Ammar’s account of Abu Ahmed’s “death” in 2001.Maya wants the telephone number of Ibrihim Sayeed’s mother, and she gets it from a Kuwaiti prince for the price of a Lamborghini. CIA operatives use electronic methods to pinpoint a caller in a vehicle who persistently exhibits tradecraft behaviors that delay confirmation of his identity. The vehicle is physically tracked to a large urban compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the Pakistan Military Academy. Gunmen attack Maya while she is in her vehicle; the action indicates to the agency that her cover is blown, so she is recalled to Washington, D.C.